Yellow Pages are known by everyone as a directory of businesses, as well as a medium for advertising. The concept of Yellow Pages was developed more than 80 years ago. This type of directory contains information about businesses categorized by headings. The categories are defined by type of product or service sold by the various businesses. Some basic information (e.g.; business name, address, phone number) is provided for each included business. Additional information can be included if a business is willing to pay extra. For example, a business can pay extra to have an in-column or display add included.
Businesses find the Yellow Pages to be a useful advertising resource. Users find the Yellow Pages to be a handy resource for finding solutions to problems.
Yellow Pages are used in all developed countries, and many other countries. Household members turn to Yellow Pages quite frequently (e.g., 100 times per year in the United States, 10-75 times per year in other countries). The Yellow Pages industry is very profitable. It is not uncommon for earnings after tax to exceed 25% of revenues. Worldwide revenues are higher than $15 billion.
Different Yellow Pages directories are published for different geographical regions (e.g.; cities, metropolitan areas, counties, collections of towns, etc.). For different geographical region, there may be several publishers of competing Yellow Pages. In addition, there are various specialty Yellow Pages, such as ethnic Yellow Pages (e.g., the Black Pages, etc.) of businesses owned by certain ethnic groups, toll free or "800" directories, etc.
Publishers sell advertisements in Yellow Pages using various techniques. Local or regional telephone companies often play a major part in sales of advertising space. These local or regional telephone companies hire a sales agent, such as L. M. Berry (TM) of Dayton, or Donnely (TM) to sell the advertising space.
Yellow Pages directories found in different countries are similar in organization and appearance to those discussed above.
With the advent of the electronic age, there is a push to make the information normally contained in Yellow Pages available in electronic media. For example, it is known to provide CD ROMs containing at least the data of Yellow Pages, if not the advertising. Such CD ROMs may be published by the same publishers who publish the paper versions of the Yellow Pages. The publishers may take the same data from the paper version, and publish it in on a CD ROM. Such electronic Yellow Pages may also be contained in commercial databases, such as DIALOG (SM) databases. DIALOG is a service mark of Dialog Information Services, Inc., which is a subsidiary of Lockheed Corporation.
The advantage of having the information in an electronic form is that it becomes much easier to search the information. For example, if you have a message to call a phone number, but cannot make out the callers name, it is possible with an electronic version of the Yellow Pages to search for the phone number, and find the business name and address. Such a search is not easily performed with a paper version, because the data is typically organized alphabetically by business name, not numerically by phone number. Other types of searches are also possible, with the electronic version, by using conventional database searching techniques and boolean connectors.
Some electronic databases including Yellow Pages information are now appearing on the Internet.
The Internet is a worldwide network of computers. The Internet began under the name ARPANET, and was started by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. For the military, computers are useful for command and control, and the original reason for ARPANET was to provide redundant connections between computers so as to have communications that are not subject to failure. Protocols were developed that allowed communications between computers over any available route, instead of a fixed route. A problem with an earlier protocol was that it restricted the number computers that could be on the ARPANET. A new protocol, called Transmission Control ProtocollInternet Protocol (TCP/IP), was later developed, and is now one of the most widely accepted networking protocols. Universities and research facilities communicated over ARPANET. In the late 1980s, the National Science Foundation developed a network (NSFNET) to connect its supercomputer centers, and this network used the TCP/IP protocols. Eventually, publicly and privately funded networks including ARPANET, and various other networks (UUCP, MILNET, USENET, BITNET, CSNET, NASA Science Internet) joined the NSFNET networks, and the collection of networks is called the Internet. The Internet today includes an international connection of intercommunicating networks, both privately and publicly funded. Most computer systems support TCP/IP, and connecting to the Internet is easy and inexpensive.
The World Wide Web is the multimedia aspect of the Internet. The World Wide Web originated at CERN (Centre Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire in Geneva, Switzerland). Hyperlinks in documents provide for immediate connection to other documents which may be on the same or on a different computer. By clicking or selecting hyperlinked terms or graphics on a web page, you are taken to another web page, or to another location in the web page you are currently reading. This is useful, for example, if reading a paper that has footnotes--while reading the main text of document, you can select a hyperlink and be taken directly to the appropriate footnote, and then, with a click of a button, back to the main text. Hyperlinks are also useful for reading a document containing complex terminology for which definitions are hyperlinked. Further, some people collect a list of resources relevant to a topic of interest, and provide hyperlinks to each of the resources from a web page. Web pages are typically written using HTML (hyper text markup language). HTML documents or pages typically include text, and references to graphics files on the servers, as well as hyperlinks. When viewed on a client computer, the graphics are combined with the text on a single screen, and some words are underlined or differently colored (or a box may appear around graphics). If these special words or graphics are clicked on with a mouse, a hyperlink prescribed in the HTML document will be followed. This will result in the client being connected to another document or file (e.g.; graphics file, sound file, etc.) which may or may not reside on a different server, or to another section of the same document. HTML is well known, and many references are available on-line that describe HTML. HTML is also described in HTML Sourcebook, by Ian S. Graham, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. HTML documents that are loaded on servers can be viewed by remote computers (clients) that have web browsers loaded thereon. One well known web browser is Mosaic (TM), available from NCSA (the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana). Another popular web browser is Netscape (TM), available from Netscape Communications Corporation, 501 East Middlefield Road, Mountain View, Calif., 94043.
Hyperlinking is also known in other applications, such as in FolioViews (TM) documents.
Web browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape allow a client to view text, graphics (e.g.; "GIFs", "JPEGs"), or a combination of text and graphics presented to the client from a server accessed by the client. The servers have unique URLs (uniform resource locators), using which the client can connect to a desired server. The typical format of a URL is HTTP://WWW.SERVER.COM/DOCUMENT.HTML, where "SERVER" would be replaced by the name of a server; "COM" would be replaced by a country code if the server is outside the U.S., or by "MIL" if a military server, or "ORG" if an organization, or "EDU" if an educational server, etc.; and where "DOCUMENT.HTML" would be replaced by the name of a document or file on the server which the client is accessing, or omitted to pull up a "home page" (a starting point for the web site). Web browsers can also be configured to launch "helper applications" when the client is presented with a file type that the browser cannot handle. File types are indicated by the extension after a dot (".") in the filename; e.g.: .JPG; .GIF, .HTML, .WAV, .MPG, etc. If the client has loaded thereon viewer or player software that can handle such a file type, the browser on the client can be configured to start (launch) the viewer software (the helper application) acting on such files if they are received. For example, if the client receives a .WAV file (an audio file), the client may automatically launch an audio player on the client computer so that the user at the client hears the sound without having to manually start the audio player on the client computer. Similarly, if the client receives a MPG file (a soundless movie file in "MPEG" format), the client may automatically launch a mpeg player to start a movie.
Some forms of Yellow Pages directories are now available on the World Wide Web. For example NYNEX maintains a web site.
Other networking protocols and hardware are also known and used for setting up networks such as local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs).
Various businesses are finding it useful to be physically located close to other businesses that sell the same or similar goods and services. Businesses that are located next to other businesses that sell similar goods and services see an increase in traffic (visits by potential customers) because the customer who is interested in a particular good or service can more easily comparison shop or locate hard to find goods or services. For example, car dealers are frequently located near other car dealers, some restaurants are located near other restaurants, some furniture stores are located near other furniture stores, etc.
It would be desirable to provide Yellow Pages information in a visually stimulating manner so as to encourage advertising by businesses, and use of the Yellow Pages by consumers. It would also be desirable to present electronic information from a database in a form where similar goods and services are grouped together.